The present invention relates to tube presses. The invention is a novel design for a tube press. It is designed to be used with various products that come in tubes such as toothpaste, ointments, glue, etc. It is a common problem for anyone using toothpaste, or any other item dispensed by manually squeezing a plastic tube, to have the contents of the tube spread throughout the tube, and in particular to the closed bottom end of the tube when the user is attempting to dispense the contents. The problem becomes greater as the tube becomes less full. It is the object of the present invention to provide assistance to the manual dispensing of material contained within such tubing. It is a further object of the present invention to prohibit the contents of a collapsible tube dispenser from spreading to the closed end of the tube, gathering the contents towards the open end and making each successive discharge of a portion of the tubes contents as easy as the first.
A number of devices have been designed that attempt to perform the same function as the present invention. However, most prior inventions are relatively complex and contain several component parts. The present invention is simple and easy to use. Some fairly simple devices have also been designed, but these are typically of a construction having a fixed gap width through which the tube is inserted. Devices of the fixed gap width design commonly make it difficult to initially insert the closed end of a tube. Also, depending on the tube and its contents, the fixed gap width either leaves a small amount of the contents in the end which should be empty, or creates too tight a fit for the device to effectively be slid along the length of the tube. It is an object of the present invention to overcome these problems in the prior art.
The present invention works well on the new plastic type tubes. When old turnkey style presses (which squeezes the tube by rolling it) are used on a new plastic tube, the tube tends to unroll and the key type press becomes ineffective and much more difficult to use than the present tube press.
With the present invention, the tube remains flat throughout. With the key type presses, the tube is slowly rolled up. This may be considered unsightly and may make the tube harder to store (such as sitting in a cup).
The inventor's parent application, now patented, provided a tube press having parallel, abutting rods with circular, rounded or polygonal cross-sections. The present invention provides alternate embodiments for those rods, improving their design for some applications.